Annie McNamara, Laura Scott Cary, Mary Wiseman, and Brittany Bradford in Business Ideas at Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival. Photo: Maria Baranova

Business Ideas, the opening entry in Clubbed Thumb’s annual Summerworks festival, is sparklingly clever: a punchy 65 minutes packed with pithy, memorable one-liners; acerbic character snapshots that paint everything that’s wrong with customer service; and capsule entrepreneurial pitches that encapsulate everything that’s wrong with startup culture in a handful of words: Poor Man’s Poem; Mental Health Sweaters; Flirty Beef. And to the extent that Milo Cramer’s script highlights the perniciousness of both hustle culture and the service economy–and that Laura Dupper’s crisp direction of an excellent ensemble fills in enough genuine emotion and surprising line readings to keep those snapshots toeing the line between character and caricature–Business Ideas can be both screamingly funny and subtly discomfiting. 

Cramer’s portraits of earnest middle-aged mom cringe, coffee-shop customer solipsism, and the way service work generates misanthropy are undoubtedly sharp and entertaining. But the play’s ultimate take on capitalism feels a little muddy. For all of barista Patty’s valid existential despair about her place in the world and in the economy, for all of teenager Lisa’s Say-Anything-esque rejection of “all conventional notions of success,” Business Ideas in the end skates perilously close to the idea that if a service worker could just be a little bit grateful she doesn’t have it worse, she’d make her peace with her existence. She’d recognize that her disappointment is “so mild, it’s hard to even complain about.”

Patty (Brittany Bradford) is a barista at an independent coffee shop that’s so actively neutral that it feels almost punishing–blond wood, inspirational slogans painted on the walls, mint green accent color, and a boss who lives and dies by Yelp reviews. (Emmie Finckel’s set is perfectly generic; the slogans Cramer has crafted–like “Stressed, Blessed, and Coffee Obsessed”–are perfectly smarmy.) The customers comprise a series of unflattering portraits of humanity—no such thing as a good customer, says Patty, until her coworker Ruth proves her wrong. Eighty percent of the play’s characters–including Patty’s boss, Patty’s coworker Ruth, and in one crowning final scene, Ruth and a customer simultaneously–are played with verve by Mary Wiseman, wielding a supple voice and a dizzying array of costumes (by Avery Reed) to hit different note after different note of professionally successful asshole (with a few detours that include a homeless person and a confused eighth-grader). Patty is drowning in student loan debt and desperately interrogating all her customers about what they do in an attempt to identify a meaningful life, but she also can’t quite bring herself to quit–or at least to quit and stick to it.

Meanwhile, Georgina (Annie McNamara, hitting just the right note of willed enthusiasm overlaying bone-deep weariness) has just been laid off—after having the temerity to ask for a raise—and she’s trying to develop an entrepreneurial spirit, camping out at the coffee shop (without buying anything) to brainstorm the mother/daughter business idea that will rescue her family from impending poverty…or just to spend time with her teenage daughter, Lisa (Laura Scott Cary). Lisa’s college fund might depend on this business idea, but then again Lisa might be morally repulsed by the very idea of entrepreneurship. 

Cramer has structured the play to be full of patterns, mirrors, and repetitions that alternately twin Lisa and Georgina or Patty and Georgina: Each has an encounter with a friend/colleague/customer that reminds them uncomfortably of another version of themselves; Georgina and Lisa mirror each other’s hand gestures when describing their most fleshed-out business pitch–though Georgina is considerably more enthusiastic about it; certain lines and exchanges happen separately in both sides of the equation. But the two stories run in parallel more than in unison–Georgina and Lisa talk mostly to each other and Patty mostly to the customers and her boss–and when they do intersect, it’s mostly via Georgina dangling false hope of a job before Patty in order to keep possession of a table all day without buying anything. And Patty and Georgina really aren’t at the same place in their journey: Georgina hit a glass ceiling and has been forced back on a downward slope she believes she can ideate her way out of, while Patty’s sociology PhD can’t get her past a $9 an hour service job. Georgina is, ultimately, a customer to whom Patty has to defer.

Georgina wants to believe that: 

There has to be some space between: “Bullies win, winner takes all, power is the only truth” 

And “I deserve nothing, I eat crumbs, having anything is evil” … 

And we have to carve out that middle space. And that’s the space we have to live in. 

But by the end of Business Ideas, it seems like maybe that space has come to exist not in the life represented by many of the barista’s customers–a life where unpleasant people succeed at professions you’d never guess by looking at/listening to them–but in forced smiles and better Yelp reviews. Cramer and Dupper are clearly trying to skewer Georgina’s dogged allegiance to middle-class aspirations that have done nothing but screw her over–while her male coworker and Lisa’s influencer friend coast from success to success–but the rest of the playworld doesn’t always cohere with that message. That paralyzing ambivalence about the depredations of patriarchal capitalism is the play’s engine but also in the end softens its punch.